Missionary Meditation, June 2008

Among those who do not believe

My last journey brought me to Ukraine where I participated in a meeting of the 30 Oblates who work in this country. I learned that the most important challenge these missionaries are confronted with, is unbelief. More than half of the 46 million Ukrainian citizens can be considered as non-believers today. Even though there was an awakening to religion after the 1989 fall of the Berlin wall, the Soviet system has had a lasting impact on the survival of faith. For 70 years, atheism had been taught in school and the words “God does not exist” were in use as a greeting for too long.

Each mission questions the faith of the missionary in its own way. For example, I have always been impressed by the early morning call to prayer in Muslim countries. It challenges my Christian faith: to almost everyone in these countries, except a tiny minority, Jesus Christ is not what He is for me. However, God is invoked and believed in, and people strive to make him the center of their personal lives and society.

Unbelief presents a different and much deeper challenge. It poses the radical question: does God exist at all? Ukraine is not the only place in the world where this lack of faith is so evident. Rich, industrialized societies in the West and the Far East, as well as poor countries such as Uruguay, push believers into a minority status.

How does unbelief come about? It may be the result of God being systematically explained away. Often science is invoked for this: natural science, the results of brain research or the insights of psychology; “The God delusion”, is the title of a popular book committed to this explaining away. Unbelief is propagated not only by an aggressive atheism (“there is no God”) or a serene agnosticism (“nothing can be known”); it may also come about as a result of simple disinterest (“I have other things to do”). All these mechanisms somehow work! It seems that through reasoning and education or simple distraction by other things, faith can be deleted from the minds of people as if it were a computer program, and so for the next generation, a tradition has been discontinued.

What does this mean for our mission? Apparently in such contexts conversions are difficult, as our Oblates in the Ukraine would affirm. The three postulants, who are with us in Ukraine, showed an acute awareness of the challenge when they asked me about the possible ways of mission in the former Soviet Union and similar experiences of Oblates in other parts of the world. I could not tell them many stories about full success, though I was able to give them some hints about approaches used by Oblates: hospitality, listening, care for the poor, work through the media.

However, I am personally convinced that this new, apparently barren mission field among those who do not believe may start greening one day and will finally bear fruit. We do have some encouraging experiences. But before that can happen, the challenge to our own faith must be taken up. Not only our missionary methods are put in question, unbelief also challenges our own personal and communitarian vocation of being Christians. Within us a residual unbelief may have remained that has resisted conversion and needs to be exposed. “Working in this country makes you feel naked”, a missionary (from another continent) stated. Being questioned by the silent, apparently unmovable majority of unbelievers is hard for us but unavoidable; Providence might have put it before us to purify our faith.

In a world of unbelief, the first and most important question for us must then be: is God truly believed in by us? The second one follows: can God’s presence in us be felt by others, can it be experienced in the quality and beauty of our lives? If people apparently have no longer a sense of God, it is up to us missionaries to make God tangible and visible to them through our own lives. Unbelief challenges us to once again put the search for God and our relationship with God, back into the center of our lives. Just as God’s majesty once shone in the life of Jesus, crucified and risen, the same miracle must happen again in the lives of his disciples. Many who today are struck with unbelief could then receive the gift of faith and with it, life in abundance.